


beyond heroics

by anjalikaastras



Category: Fate/Grand Order
Genre: Fate Week 2021, I wrote this while very very very sleep deprived I'm so sorry, Other, Tags to be added as I go along, if you see me on twitter you don't, some gore descriptions ? very light tho, the major death is karna we been knew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 11:54:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28670304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anjalikaastras/pseuds/anjalikaastras
Summary: Arjuna, Karna and Kurukshetra.Time moves too slow and too fast for the both of them. Gandiva’s arrows strain against its hundred strings. Karna must die — should die, for all he’s done, but his words are truth too, but he has perpetuated so many crimes against those Arjuna loved that it is second nature that he should avenge those sent to Devaloka as youths. There are too many reasons for one possibility or the other, so one shall settle for this: a decision made in the rubicund of Surya’s descent, a decision spurred on by a god’s whispered words and a man’s choice to fulfil vengeance sworn in a dark forest, a decision that put an end to all others.Fate Week 2021 - Day 1: Hero/Villain
Relationships: Arjuna Alter | Berserker & Arjuna | Archer, Arjuna | Archer & Karna | Lancer of Red
Kudos: 5





	beyond heroics

There was beauty in seeing an arrow in flight thudding solemnly into a target, once. There was a subtle, swift magnificence in archery, like flight without wings, like a voiceless song. There was a majesty to it like a dancer’s gazelle-like leap through the air. There is no such beauty here — it is a barren stage after the performance is over. Here in Kurukshetra, most holy of battlegrounds, there are only the corpses of a hundred men beneath chariot wheels. In the mire formed after each battle, their armour is cracked and smeared with mud, and he cannot tell a Kaurava fighter from a Pandava one. It would be laughably ironic if he did not know many of the faces that now lie pale and stiff. Many look — _were_ — old enoughto be fathers. Some were not so lucky.

Friends lie with broken necks and glassy eyes on Kurukshetra, and Arjuna is not so naive as to think that none of them were slaughtered by his own hands. The _astras_ and the river of arrows that so steadily issue from Gandiva are as indiscriminate as the death they bring. The death of friends is immanent in war, yet some childish part of Arjuna wants to deny it, think to himself: _it would happen to everyone else, but not to me_.

And why should it happen to him? He is the one blessed by thousands of gods, that laid their weapons and wealth upon him. Awarded Hero Arjuna, son of the king of devas, is to archers as one of the unreachable stars in the sky.

“Fate’s wheel changes for no one, Partha,” Krishna says, goading the horses to avoid a nasty looking bit of ground where bone is sticking out of a corpse. To an observer, it seems like an astute, if general, observation on the inevitabilities of destiny — the results of _punya_ and _papa_. To Arjuna, who knows the sapphire-skinned man more intimately than he knows Panchali, it is a look into his heart. Krishna has the right words for any situation, though not always the kindest.

Right. This is destiny — the _dharma_ of _kshatriya_ such as himself. Good fights evil and crushes it. Then as if a despicable worm, evil rises up once more, leading to the downfall of _yugas_ — then, in the cycle, it is vanquished once more. Arjuna himself, Krishna, even Yudhisthira, who was always closest to the devas and their mysterious ways — all of them are but weapons placed upon Bhumi’s body that they may serve their function and destroy demons.

The chariot slows and Krishna withdraws skins of water for the horses, black bees’ honey for himself and the third Pandava. Surya’s chariot skims the horizon now — a thread’s thickness between slaughter and a night’s respite.

“Return and rest, Partha. You are no machine — you will break if you continue to work yourself like this. But first — behind your left.”

His fingers find the arrows of the inexhaustible quiver strapped to his right, and he pulls fast enough that its point finds its mark in the skull of a _rakshasha_ warrior before he can fully turn around. Surya chooses that moment to finally plunge down, and in the clamour of the horns that announce battle’s end for the day — Arjuna lets himself be lost in the crimson symphony played by both his own side and the Kauravas’.

  
  


There is something to be said about stains, especially regarding how and where they were earned. Karna is spotless and therefore sinless, as general sentiment goes in the current yuga, where men are still close enough to Devaloka to hear the songs of gods. And it is this sinlessness, the confidence of being supported by a man who has done no wrong, that has invigorated Duryodhana, made him think himself capable of winning Kurukshetra even as thousands of omens showed him otherwise. 

(As an aside, Arjuna can understand that sort of focus and single-minded belief — it is the same kind you need to brush aside _ashoka_ leaves as easily as breathing and pierce the eye of a wooden bird with a single arrow. Life, as Acharya once said (when he was still just Arjuna’s respected guru and not Senapati of an army that defended those who would cling to what they did not deserve), is archery in itself. The body is a bow, breath the force that pulls its strings, and myriads of arrows myriads of choices.)

The main topic being: Arjuna can stand to fight a man called sinless and perfect, a man whose generosity shamed even the king of gods out of a single use of his prized spear. Arjuna, who befriended Vishnu’s avatar for this life and so carries the weight of dharma like the diadem crowning his hair, can stand to do as Krishna wishes, unsavoury as they might be. Arjuna, Kunti’s fourth son, who never contested the rights of Indraprastha’s throne despite being son of Devaloka’s ruler, can stand the slander of later times for the hope that goodness would prevail.

But Arjuna cannot stand to tell himself that Karna deserves his spotless reputation, because in a gambling hall years ago, a scene polished to clarity by the cloth of shame, Panchaali had been shamed, and every drop of blood on the _sabha_ ’s floor had been another blow to her dignity. 

Arjuna looks at his hands, suddenly, still gloved and spotless, and feels revulsion at the pale cloth, at Karna’s fair skin, at ivory for remaining so utterly _pristine_ in a world that seems determined to drag every one of its defenders into the mud and leave them there. He could rip off his archer’s gloves. He could go to the Kaurava camp in the night, as they slept unawares and every time Gandiva hummed its silent melody, his hands — his bare hands — would become more bloodied. He could pluck Karna’s head from his neck like Shiva’s devotees snipped _mallika_ flowers from their stems to offer worship.

But he does not, because Prince Arjuna is a hero, and massacres in the middle of dead night, with Chandra as the only witness, do not befit heroes.

  
  


So he waits. He fights like a man possessed even as fathers and sons fall around him.

So he waits. He walks the fields of Kurukshetra at night and tries to avoid where the blood flows thickest, a river of crimson sin actualised.

So he curses, when destiny’s wheel materialises as a fateful _chakravyuha_ , when his son returns to his lunar father in a shower of blood and broken honour.

  
  


There are promises worth breaking yourself for. There are oaths worth shattering your very body, your soul to keep. Warriors fight as is their life’s duty, and are rewarded with heaven for accomplishing said duty. And as all occupations, their battles come with rules as well. There is honour in fighting as _kshatriya_ must, the Brahmin say, and to do battle without that honour is the domain of the common rabble. The rules of war are sacrosant, and to break them is to invite…

...to invite _what_?

His treacherous cousin still lives, and men more worthy of the Kuru name than he have perished to ensure such.

The sun rushes headlong to the horizon, as if to delay this by a single day longer. Arjuna is tired. This is not Duryodhana, but he has grudge with Karna nonetheless. They stand, two fathers who have lost all their children to this pointlessness that is their war — their war not to reclaim any sort of palace or dynasty, but merely to rule its ashes — and just...stare. It’s a moment so brief as to be less than a footnote in time.

Their eyes meet across bare land — after all, when warriors who are laden with divine _astras_ such as they fight, it is best to stay clear out of their way. Arjuna lifts his bow and Karna mirrors the action. Krishna whips the _gandharva_ horses into action and Shalya mirrors him, white mares whinnying. They perform transcendent feats of archery as they shoot, restring, retaliate, the likes of which have long surpassed those generations before them, and will surpass long generations after. Vijaya and Gandiva are different bows, but their refrain — threnody and warcry both — meld into each other as their wielders continue to fight.

  
  


Their battle is spoken of exhaustively in the texts that will come, and Sanjay will relate it all in glorious detail to blind Dhritarashtra in his palace. For now, we speak of matters less flamboyant and flashy than Karna and Arjuna, one a royal bastard soaring to the sun against the odds, the other a prince laden with the gods’ love. We speak of two men and their choices that have brought them to this point.

The moment in their battle is one well-known. Bhumi, repaying a curse once spoken in rage, rises and seizes the wheel of the chariot — the mares cannot rise from where they are painfully jerked upright, and Shalya’s efforts to unearth his vehicle prove fruitless. So Karna must (lethally so) dismount and lower his mount, and speak words of honour and law and rules that both of them know have been broken once, twice, thrice, over and over and over again. Words have no power against the almighty strength of the devas’ weapons, but against their wielder —

Time moves too slow and too fast for the both of them. Gandiva’s arrows strain against its hundred strings. Karna must die — _should_ die, for all he’s done, but his words are truth too, but he has perpetuated so many crimes against those Arjuna loved that it is second nature that he should avenge those sent to Devaloka as youths. There are too many reasons for one possibility or the other, so one shall settle for this: a decision made in the rubicund of Surya’s descent, a decision spurred on by a god’s whispered words and a man’s choice to fulfil vengeance sworn in a dark forest, a decision that put an end to all others.

It is Karna who dies that day, of course, as all the stories will say: dies in a flash of light as the _anjalikaastra_ snips his head off to leave him kneeling, neck spouting blood as sanguine as the setting sun. But it is also Arjuna who walks away from that battle less himself than he was before: Arjuna who loses a brother, Arjuna who loses something deep within that wavers and goes out like a guttered lamp.

It is Arjuna who loses heroism, and wears a pale mockery of it, forged in lies and excuses, like a diadem for the years after.

**Author's Note:**

> good lord this is terrible i'm so sorry i rushed it for fateweek.


End file.
